11-24-2015

 

Judy Jordan

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After the Farmer's Market​

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In this hoofed hour before dawn,
                       in the flustered scuttle of small animals

 

in underbrush and leaf flutter intent in their clawed search. Shot

 

moon and scumbled cloud, screech owl and bobcat scream. Moth,

 

bat, and souls of the newly dead flitting leaf to leaf.

 

In the smell of honeysuckle and angel heart,

 

in the tick of each star clicking off
and darkness drifting
toward its concession to day's factory of heat and glare,

 

wake, wake, rise and go
through these empty streets to meet that sunrise of
smelted coins hot with the grief of many hands.

 

Wake, wake, wake,
                           get up, get up, and go now.

 

In this hour of terror,
                              birds crying out,

 

crying to the blood, to the bitter reek, to
the spilled guts of the night's hunted,

 

scattered chirps and screeches sifting in wind,
rustling through tree limbs, easing down like a preened feather

to settle in the nests of woven grasses and weeds.

 

In this hour of the dead,
                                  get up, get up, and go.

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Prowl the steaming, empty streets. Follow the bristle-­brushed
truck along the dreary wave of asphalt as the grumbling,
diesel-­belching beast hoses yesterday into the gutters.

 

Get up and go past the rail yard and feed stores,
past the vestibules and crumbling doorways of hunger and no sleep, 
past the drunks swaying on the curb's edge,
cabbies getting high in their cars as they wait out the hours,
                                                      the horrible and lonely hours.

 

Now, in the crooked teeth of dawn,
in the growl and lolling tongue,
                                            everything else must wait.
 

The runaways who scour parking lots,
                                                     heel-­to-­toe,
for any dropped thing,

 

ghosts of the black-­owned businesses, barbershops
and doctor's offices bulldozed to build this pedestrian mall,

 

ghosts who hover here with the blue fog,
ghosts squeezed fish-­eyed under the ridged mountains,
ghosts slipping along this street with its lobbed and slab-­

sided board and batten and drywall houses, must wait.
                                                                              Ghosts 

 

who climb up the slink and squeak

of the narrow steps to the one‐room,
fourth floor walk‐up where Ming‐Loy shares a cot
with her five‐year‐old daughter who must wait,
                      wait for the tea kettle to scream out,

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wait for Ming­‐Loy to pour this long lick of sinewy water over her
crouched in a tin bucket, wait for her to say, Broken plumbing.

Cheap rent,
                wait for the leftovers I will take her,

 

vegetables, cut flowers, it all, it all, it all must wait now
for I must get up, get up, rise and go.

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                                  Home at three AM
from the pizza delivery job, up at five with the shrieking birds. Get up and go.

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               Oh do not think
of how little will be made, six hours in the heat-­scorched lot,
                     bone-­honed blade of exhaustion

 

edging up the ladder of my back
with my small offerings of coneflowers,
                                                       tomatoes and yellow squash
curled in on themselves like question marks,

for the sweating hoards of dimes and nickels,
                                                       damp wrinkle of dollar bills,

just get up, get up, pack the truck and go.

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◊

 

The letter, picked up off the street said,
so I've found you. What you're doing is time. Jail time
is the longest time. When I see you again it won't be in there
but out here. Here's a twenty for you. Say goodbye
to Toto. We're not in Kansas anymore.

 

◊

 

The gout-­legged man resting on the bench said,
You have to keep one leg out of your pants
when you take a crap. So you don't get trapped.
That's what you have to do in jail.

 

◊

 

The man shouted into his cell phone, That's what I get
for trusting damned, no‐good, lazy, white trash.

 

◊

 

And Luna, who sold incense and hand­‐made soap, is dead.

 

And Regina, the muffin­‐queen, who waited a year
so Blue Cross would cover her back's busted disc,
ignoring blood in her stools, cancer's filed teeth 
gnawing along her colon, is dead.

 

◊

 

I have seen the women piling from their pimps' Caddies,
seen them spread through the streets
like a rare virus seeping organ to organ,
have seen the sheriff's notice nailed on the door, RENT PAST DUE,

family photos, marksman medals, all the trivia of years
and lives the landlord hauls to the dumpster, ground up
by the trash truck as if in Polyphemus' gaping jaws,
have seen the heavy-­booted men splattered with concrete,

 

hunched at the bar, dull-­eyed through the sitcom's canned laughter,
their entire lives laid out before them like a rough-­stitched corpse
trundled into its cold slot after the coroner's knife,
and I, no Lazarus, sores licked by dogs, not wrenched

 

from Abraham's arms, not risen from the dead to warn
the rich man's brothers, only a piping voice that begs the stars
to cast their cold, lidless gaze onto me as I plead that I not die
in such a wrong time, such a wrong place.

 

◊

 

Now the sun directly overhead so I must
reload the unsold coreopsis, drooping columbine,
                    vegetables, sun-­bruised and soft,
even as they come,
                           those who know the closing hours,
who know the cull of bruised peaches and over­‐grown squash.

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They spill from their rust-­shot four‐doors,
cars held together with tar, duct tape,
                                                     clothes hangers and string. 

Washed in this warped and ruined light,

                                  a dime store daubing, a bad draft,
I wait here and want to know what happened
to that life I signed up for,
the one with chubby cheeks and blonde hair,
                       the freckle‐spattered nose and easy smile.

 

I wait and watch as they wave away yellow jackets
from the mesh-­metal trash cans, watch
string-­haired teenagers turn their backs on mothers
who pull out worm-­gnawed eggplant and yellowing cucumbers.

 

                                            Oh how fragile, how frail
this thing we call a body: How desperate and tender
it all seems: Those scant few years ago
when I stood outside any fast food joint,
                                  too skinny, gulping the grease stink, 

 

and just last year, lugging boulders, splitting wood, then, the burst disc,
             pain tunneling down my hamstring,

 

and now these sullen teenagers, pacing
this parking lot, pretending not to know
their own mothers whose arms are swallowed
by trash cans, who scratch their nails against the melon's mushy rind
and I hold out the blood-­‐red tomatoes, the milky corn:

 

                                                          Come, I whisper,
come, I cry out like some ancient song, a song of hunger,
                                                                          a song of sorrow,
and they creep from the trash cans, the wrecked cars, the blind alleys,
creep from all the hiding places of the poor,
as hunger, musk-­‐mouthed hunger, lumbers from its dark doorway. 

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-from Hunger, celebrated with permission of the poet, order Twenty Years of PoemoftheWeek.com here

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"A long poem is a covenant. You’re asking the reader to walk with you longer than they normally would—through fire, through fog, through flood. For their time, you must offer gifts. Not just once, not just at the end, but every few lines. Rhythm. Image. Music. Simile so charged it rewires the body. These are the offerings that keep a reader with you. The long poem must move with necessity. 98It cannot simply repeat what it knows. It must deepen, widen, fracture, transform. You can use motif as spine—sound, symbol, line—but what returns must return changed. A root must split stone. A line must throb differently after the page turns. It must have momentum that gathers heat and burns. That momentum must carry the reader through the flood, the fire, off the cliff’s edge."

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Judy Jordan’s first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, won the 1999 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the Utah Book of the Year Award, the OAY Award from the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award. Her second book of poetry, Sixty Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance, was published by LSU press. Her third book, Hunger, was published by Tinderbox Editions. Her fourth book Children of Salt is forthcoming from Tinderbox. She has recently completed a novel, Broken Days, Broken Hearts and is currently working on a memoir, My Mama, My Sweet Nelly. Jordan built her own environmentally friendly earthbag and cob house off-grid surrounded by the Shawnee National Forest, and teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. mics.siu.edu/humanities-social-sciences/english/faculty/jordan-judy.php

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